A while back, my wife and I contributed content to a textbook called Children’s Books and the Developing Reader. I also drew illustrations for the chapters. While switching computers, I came across the files and thought they might be worth posting …

As many of you know, a few months back, my wife and I brought home our very first human baby. In advance of the birth, I had made a point of leaving Mary cute little sketches of what our baby might look like — most all of which she deemed “terrifying.” I thought I’d share them with readers …

And now, here’s the real deal! This is Penelope Fern Auxier. Not quite as many fangs as I’d imagined …

Exactly one year ago, I began this blog with a picture of a hand drawn Christmas tree. It’s been a lot of fun, and I hope to be a bit more regular with posting in the new year. In the meantime, I wish all of you a happy holiday!

No fancy post today because I’m visiting schools in anticipation of a signing event at Mrs. Nelson’s Bookstore in LaVerne TONIGHT at 5:00pm!!!! Come check it out. If you can’t make that, I’m having my first LA signing tomorrow at Chevalier’s in Hollywood from 1-3pm — please, oh please come!

In the meantime, I thought I’d post a picture I drew a while back. I was showing my younger cousins Jude and Asher (5 and 7, respectively) how the drawing tablet on my computer worked. I asked the oldest one what I should draw. He said, “Darth Vader!” I asked the younger one where Darth Vader should be. He said, “In the bathroom!” And there you have it …

What’s the difference between irony and sarcasm? Most thesauri list them as synonyms, but anyone who’s been on the receiving end of either type of humor can tell you the difference at once: ironic statements make you laugh, and sarcastic statements make you cry.

Many a protective parent has assured his or her teased child that sarcasm is the lowest form of humor. And the word sarcasm literally translates to mean “to tear the flesh.” But what exactly is it it about a sarcastic statement that makes it a low form of humor? And what makes it “tear the flesh?” I’ve been mulling over this question for a while now, and I think I’ve landed on an answer:

Sarcasm happens when the observed irony does not extend to the speaker.

That is to say that an ironic person includes himself among the mocked, whereas a sarcastic person stands outside the situation in judgement. See how it might play out in the below scene involving a bunch of nerds camping outside of a movie theater:

In this instance, the guy making fun of the people is including himself in the joke — after all, he’s in the line, too! But consider what happens when the speaker is not in line with the others:

Sarcasm is the one kind of joke that can be made by someone who does not actually find something funny — it is humor for the humorless. In life, I have a problem with sarcasm because I don’t believe that any person has the right to laugh at others unless he can first laugh at himself.

And what about sarcasm in storytelling?

To be clear, I’m all for sarcastic characters (I enjoy Holden Caulfield as much as the next guy!). But sarcastic authors are a different thing altogether. Sarcastic authors attempt to point out absurdities in the world, but they try to do it from a safe distance — never letting themselves become a part of the joke. The only way to do this is by creating straw men for the express purpose of knocking them down. Ironically(!), this ends up undercutting the author’s initial goal, because now instead of critiquing the world, he is critiquing some flimsy characters who bear little resemblance to the world.

Here’s another thing that makes Mary awesome: she lets me draw tattoos on her! Pretty much every night while she’s reading in bed, I pull out a pen and give her a sweet tat on her arm, shoulder, or foot.1 I work with a variety of themes in my art — most of them are slightly more violent re-imaginings of Lisa Frank pictures.2 Take this most recent example, which I have titled “Zebra with Machine Gun”:

Please note how the Artist has chosen to make the bullets from the machine gun go all the way around the arm and then explode in back of the Zebra’s head! Genius! Now if only she’d let me frame the original…3

I have tried, more than once, to tattoo her face, but for some reason, she refuses. ↩

The above picture is one I drew in church last week. My whole life, I’ve drawn in church. My father was a pastor when I was growing up, and my mum understood that drawing can help right-brained people concentrate.1 And so every Sunday, when my father started his sermon, she would pull a box of art supplies from her purse so the two of us could draw.

Drawing can have a powerful meditative effect. My mother’s work — which she affectionately refers to as her “knittings” — elevates this idea to a new level. Each painting represents hundreds of hours of meticulous, repetitive mark-making to build textures. All of these large-scale paintings began as tiny “knittings” worked out in small notebooks, sometimes in church.

I recently discovered another artist who draws in church. Abrams illustrator John Hendrix has an entire section of his website devoted to drawings he’s done while sitting through sermons. I’ll let him explain:

“Drawing in my sketchbook is the very best part of my work. I love it because it is linear improvisation. Much like jazz, it is unpredictable, exciting and unfiltered. Often with very good and very bad results. I attend church every Sunday, and I draw during the sermon. All of these pages were done in a pew (though I don’t bring my watercolors with me- that waits till I get home). Simultaneous drawing and listening transforms familiar language into something new- a feedback loop of symbols, theology and wonder.”

John’s work puts me to shame. Behold:

I think this sort of meditative drawing extends beyond the pews.2 When I got to college, I started drawing in journals while I listened to lectures. A lot of the pictures were mnemonic devices related to the lecture, others were the germs of what would later become stories. (I still remember the afternoon in graduate school when I found myself sketching a certain blind thief!)

College also happens to be when I started to become a better student — my grades went up, and I started to take a more active role in what I was learning. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I can’t help but wonder whether there are kids out there struggling with school who might be helped by being given a box of art supplies?

My mum never wore the “pastor’s wife” hat too comfortably. More than once she was confronted by ladies in the congregation for wearing too much black. ↩

Just to be clear, the sermon I heard this week had nothing to do with baseball or monsters … though part of me wishes it had. ↩

I recently stumbled across commenter Lisa’s new word blog This Wretched Hive.1 Lisa writes smart, succinct posts about words old and new. One of my favorite pieces discusses portmanteaus. Portmanteaus are words that combine two different words to make something new: televangelist, spork, interrobang, etc.

I love portmanteaus because when done well, they brush up against word play. In fact, without that element, portmanteaus pretty much fail. Consider the example Lisa discovered in her grocery store:

“Portmanteau” is actually a French word for an upright trunk that has dresser-like compartments in one half and a hanging closet in the other.2 I first discovered the word as a child when I read Lewis Carroll’s introduction to “The Hunting of the Snark.” He observes:

Humpty Dumpty’s theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take the two words “fuming” and “furious”. Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first … if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “frumious”.

Carroll is referring to something Humpty Dumpty says in Alice in Wonderland3 in order to explain how a reader might be able to decode the made-up words in his famous nonsense poem, “The Jabberwocky.”

A few years later, while scouring footnotes in Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice (which I read nightly for over a decade), I discovered that Alice in Wonderland was actually the first time portmanteau was used in this linguistic sense. Way to be awesome, Lewis Carroll!

How's this for an opening line? "Before you fairly start this story I should like to give you just a word of warning. If you imagine you are going to read of model children, with perhaps; a naughtily inclined one to point a moral, you had better lay down the book immediately ... Not one of the seven is really good, for the very excellent reason that Australian children never are." - Ethel Turner, Seven Little Australians